Archibald, Wynne, Sulman and Dobell Prizes Art Gallery of New South Wales, June 1 - July 21

The Archibald Prize has come to occupy a curious position in Australian art. It is the most prominent public face of contemporary painting in Sydney, and will be many people's only face-to-face contact with contemporary art. Yet as a gauge of what good painters are doing it is, at best, uninformative and likely to actually mislead its audience. Many entrants are once-a-year portraitists, seemingly lured by the prospect of the cash prize or exposure, and straining to adapt a style formed within one genre to the problems of painting a portrait. The full-time portraitists are not, for the most part, an artistically adventurous bunch, and the Archibald thus becomes notable not for artistic achievement, but as a merry-go-round of hype, celebrity and controversy. One returns year after year hoping for the best, but expecting nothing.

I know of only a few portraitists working anywhere in the world today who have managed to invest the genre with life and direct it to a significant artistic end. With its emphasis on a particular individual, often in a specific environment, the portrait could be used as a counter to the forces of cultural homogenisation and dehumanisation, but it would take a painter of considerable insight and spirit to achieve this. This year's Archibald Prizewinner, Cherry Hood, is not that painter. Her portrait, Simon Tedeschi unplugged, is a facile painting, a capitulation to the sales-and-marketing aesthetic that dominates our culture. The lighting and cropping, the pose and demeanour of the sitter, indeed the tenor of the image, bring to mind the stylishly damaged faces of models in fashion advertisements. The clean white backdrop conforms to the contemporary equating of antiseptic minimalism to visual sophistication, and yet the saccharine dribbles of watercolour will probably evoke for many the aura of artistic risk. An unmistakable indication of Hood's intent to paint a winning portrait, as opposed to a good portrait, is the scaling-up of the sitter to billboard proportions, which serves no other purpose than to impress by gigantism. Most portraits in the western tradition, particularly bust-length portraits, are smaller than a square metre. Rembrandt's Self-Portrait at the age of 34 measures 93 x 80 cm; Manet's Berthe Morisot is a tiny 50 x 40 cm. The sense of being at one with another human presence, so masterfully achieved in these works, is aided by the humanity of their scale. Hood's work is closer in methodology to the murals of Saddam Hussein one sees in footage of Baghdad. Simon Tedeschi unplugged is not, to borrow from contemporary art parlance, an 'interactive piece'. The communication is one-way, from artist to throng.

The portrait that should have won this year's Archibald is, in my opinion, Angus Nivison's Annie Lewis, September 2001. Nivison is best known for landscapes, but he brings to portraiture a highly evolved conception of painterly form and a depth of feeling that sets his painting apart from almost all other entries. Using shapes and marks in a subdued palette, Nivison presents a visage at the edge of naturalism, brimming with life and thought. While many of this year's entrants seem uncertain of how to relate the human form to a depicted environment and the picture plane, Nivison uses the picture plane as a screen on which to project his subject. His realisation of Annie Lewis as a dynamic spatial entity lends this portrait great intensity, notwithstanding the stillness of her seated pose.

Only four or five other entries in this year's Archibald convince me that the encounter between painter and sitter has been artistically fruitful. Tom Carment's small, dappled head of Richard Neville, Neil Evans's Reflective self-portrait and David Fairbairn's expressionistic drawings of Dr. Vincenzo Blefari (which use enlargement to advantage) are among them. Adam Cullen's portraiture is the art of matching style and process to subject, and his droll painting of "Chopper" Read finds just the right pitch, between deadpan delivery and expressive excitement. Finally, Brent Harris's Leo Schofield is a beautiful, unexpected painting that presents a striking and good-humoured likeness. Its graphic simplicity is a refreshing counterpoint to the dry realism and emotive slather characteristic of many entries.

As landscape painting remains a living tradition in Australian art, the Wynne Prize would be a more likely forum than the Archibald to offer a positive reflection of contemporary painting. In this year's exhibition, though, many of Australia's best painters of landscape - Joe Furlonger, Don Heron, Idris Murphy and Ken Whisson, for example - aren't present, raising the question of whether entering the big prizes is inconsistent with making serious art.

In the Wynne exhibition a room is devoted to works that purport to reconstitute the artist's experience of landscape as an all-over field of painterly incident. The risk with this type of painting is that the drive towards simplification and abstraction can leave a hollow shell, a painting that has ceased to be concerned with anything other than manipulating paint. This year's winner, Angus Nivison's Remembering Rain, marries the all-over tendency to a structure derived from trees and landforms. It is a beautiful painting, but it wants for some disruptive element to break the uniformity of its resolution, and convince the viewer that its generalisations are founded on something tangible. The rightful winner might be John Walker. His Crossing the Shoalhaven envelops the viewer in a scene that, through its shifting, stretching form, conveys a profound sense of time's passage. The success of Walker's painting is its use of the landscape to account for the perceptive act.

The Sulman Prize was won by Guan Wei's silly Gazing into deep space no. 9, a lightweight contender if ever there was one. John Walker's entry (three fleshy nude drinkers) and Elisabeth Cummings's Early morning, Currumbin displayed greater originality and spirit than the Wei; Tim Johnson or Bernard Ollis would also have been more deserving winners. However, one has to question the meaning of a prize that ranges across figure composition, narrative episodes, gestural abstraction, construction and just about anything else that isn't a portrait or landscape.

It would have been hard to pick a winner in the Dobell Prize for Drawing. There isn't a single drawing that asserts itself as 'the one', or takes the viewer by surprise. With most of the drawings tending either towards broad mark-making or fine rendering, one wonders what happened to linear drawings. Perhaps they were among the rejected works. The winner, Mary Tonkin's Rocky Outcrop, Werribee Gorge is at the scale we have come to associate with winning entries, and its resolution of a complex subject is, on a certain level, ambitious; but what a drab image. For sheer strength and vigour, David Fairbairn's large portrait head stood out, and Joe Furlonger's The coal loader, an ascending view of a sea port in brush and ink, broke free from conventional perspective. At the other end of the spectrum, Jenny Sages's finely drawn Red shoes from Vinnies was an absorbing suite of works.

-Ernest Foster

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